I'm genuinely curious how you think artists should be compensated for their work.

They always were entertainment, so: concerts, performances etc.

Sponsorship and patronage. Who knows. As long as it's not this artificial scarcity illusion.

The scarcity isn’t in the reproducibility of intellectual property. It’s in human motivation.

Yes. People are supposed to get paid for the labor of creating. Not the finished product.

Why would we pay people for the labor, not the product? I don't care if something took you 1 minute of 10 years, it's value to me doesn't change (except in the case where the 1 minute version is reproduced a lot by you and it's scarcity gives it value)

Because creators are scarce and finished products are not. It's simple.

We're in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers, and these people are trying to sell bits. It makes no sense. If your work is making bits, you need to figure out a way to get paid for the labor of discovering those bits, not the bits themselves.

Because god knows how easy it is to copy those bits after they've been found.

We've already figured out a way to compensate creators for their work—it's called copyright. You say you don't like it, but you don't propose any alternative either, which makes you sound like an entitled brat.

Copyright is not necessarily the best way for creators to get compensated. For example, for most musicians in the US it's only a small part of their income [1]. Study is from 2013, could be different in the Spotify era, but it found that on average 12% of musicians' income came from copyright-related sources. 22% if you count session recording. Top-earners made a higher percentage from copyright. It isn't terrible, but it's not exactly the main way musicians are making money.

Writers make basically all of their money from copyright-related sources, but the median income from writing for full-time authors in the US is 20k [2].

My point is, copyright is a way to compensate creators for their work, but it's not the only way, and in practice for most people it doesn't do a stellar job.

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2199058 [2]: https://authorsguild.org/news/authors-guild-survey-shows-dra...

I have issues with your interpretations of both papers. High level: The paper on authors says it's Amazons monopoly rent seeking as why writers don't get paid more Music is also famously an industry where artists rarely own the copyright for their (recorded) music, instead selling it to cover production and advertising costs. Also, the music study suffers from and the paper on musicians has a good deal of classical performers and teachers in the mix skewing the sample. These are not professionals that interact with copyright in any meaningful sense, but they are also not professionals that would be classified as creators.

Of course, because music can be performed. People will pay to see a live performance, which means music performers aren't entirely reliant on selling recorded performances. Live readings, on the other hand, don't attract large crowds and therefore aren't a great source of income, making writers more dependent on IP rights. It's pretty obvious.

Oh please. I cared enough to propose some alternatives up above but the truth is I don't really need to fix their broken business model for them. How they get paid is literally their problem. If they insist on selling bits, they're free to seethe endlessly when people copy those bits with complete impunity. I'm done feeling sorry for these monopolists.

So we're going back to the feudal times were artists live in servitude arrangements with the propertied classes? It's pretty funny how artificial is a pejorative in your world when it precedes 'scarcity' but not when it precedes 'intelligence'.

Property rights are the basis for any society in which people have independence and autonomy. I think we should put software developers on sponsorship and donations for a year so that they understand the consequence of an economy like this.

>So we're going back to the feudal times were artists live in servitude arrangements with the propertied classes?

Most of what we see today as the greatest art of all time was produced under this arrangement, so if we look purely at the outcome for society, the arrangement can't be that bad.

> So we're going back to the feudal times were artists live in servitude arrangements with the propertied classes?

As if it's any different now. Wanna create something and need money to make it happen? Be prepared to enter into arrangements with rich investors and corporations and producers. The people with the money will literally get credited in your works.

> It's pretty funny how artificial is a pejorative in your world when it precedes 'scarcity' but not when it precedes 'intelligence'.

The "artificial" in intelligence is a technological limitation: it's not a real intelligence because we haven't been able to make one. The "artificial" in artificial scarcity is a condition humans impose on abundant resources in order to create an economy where there is none: we have the technology to copy and distribute these abundant resources but the monopolists won't have it.

So you bet it's pejorative.

> Property rights are the basis for any society in which people have independence and autonomy.

Sure. Real property like land and physical possessions. Not this imaginary property that only exists to let people turn abundance into scarcity.

> I think we should put software developers on sponsorship and donations for a year so that they understand the consequence of an economy like this.

I don't even disagree. Software developers are also creators that exploit their monopolies for gain. Personally I don't even believe in copyleft licenses, they only exist to fix copyright and turn it to our advantage. There should be no copyrights to fix in the first place.

>Sure. Real property like land and physical possessions. Not this imaginary property that only exists to let people turn abundance into scarcity

There is no difference between the two. All property is 'imaginary'. Turning abundance into scarcity is literally the only reason to have property rights all the time, including in the physical world. Land isn't actually scarce in most places.

The reason we introduce scarcity and ownership for land as well as digital goods is exactly the same. because it gives the owner an incentive to tend to it. It lets you capture the value of the improvements you add to it. The enclosure of the commons didn't happen because the commons were scarce, it happened to create conditions for their development rather than their abuse.

Software developers who don't own their code earn 800 dollars on patreon will Microsoft makes millions of their labor. This is literally the economics of free software. It's the largest upwards distribution of wealth ever invented. Imaginary property, that is to say intellectual property, is the only thing that puts you on even ground with Microsoft. You want a world without it where hardware is the only thing that matters? Good luck competing.

> There is no difference between the two. All property is 'imaginary'. Turning abundance into scarcity is literally the only reason to have property rights all the time, including in the physical world. Land isn't actually scarce in most places.

No way. Physical things are scarce. This is basic physics. You cannot duplicate energy or matter. Two physical bodies cannot occupy the same space. Physical property is not even in the same conceptual space as intellectual property. Land isn't scarce in most places? Really.

Exactly none of the properties I just mentioned apply to any form of intellectual property. You can duplicate bits infinitely at negligible costs.

> Software developers who don't own their code earn 800 dollars on patreon will Microsoft makes millions of their labor.

Microsoft makes a zillion dollars off of free software labor because those developers were tricked into giving up their rights while simultaneously allowing Microsoft to retain theirs. It makes no sense to give away code unless everyone does. I have three answers to this:

Abolish copyright straight up. Now everyone's on equal footing with Microsoft. No longer a crime to use their proprietary code when it inevitably leaks and even make money off of it.

License everything under AGPLv3. They can't exploit your free labor if they refuse to touch your free software code. This is the approach I ended up choosing because I don't have the power to enact the previous solution. I don't think I'll ever license anything under a "permissive" license ever again.

Simply don't publish the code. Nothing wrong with keeping it private, for one's own use only. I do this too.

Universal basic income to begin with. So they can create if they feel like it instead of waiting tables to make ends meet.

That's an incredibly reductive view. Copyright protects me when I do any creative work, I do not want my creative work to be part of any AI training dataset without my explicit permission, and I want laws that force people training generative AI models to copyright clear all of their training data and moreover be able to show which inputs corresponded to which outputs so the result is auditable.

If Disney trains an AI good enough to just generate a good story then I think that everyone who fed training data into that model should get a piece of the revenue.

AI copies everything, except copyright notices. Curious why is that?

Reductive for you, maybe. I don't want this technology limited in literally any way. How many times must we go through this? Destroying perfectly good technology because it hurts the copyright industry's interests? I say it's time to end copyright instead. They're holding us back with these concerns.

This is going to be awkward for the incentive to generate these models which are protected by the same rights.

Not that awkward, open source models exist.

Open source uses legal IP protections and removing them would have significant ramifications to open-source licenses.

You're mixing different issues. Your exact quote was "This is going to be awkward for the incentive to generate these models which are protected by the same rights".

Except right now models are being released openly, with anyone being able to download and fine-tune the weights. Yes, they have licenses, but it's not like the licenses protect some core part of their business models. Whatever incentives they had to release those weights, they would mostly have the same incentives if copyright law disappeared overnight.

> If Disney trains an AI good enough to just generate a good story then I think that everyone who fed training data into that model should get a piece of the revenue.

So, if Disney decides to incorporate a sailing boat in ther stories, does that mean that anyone who has been making sailing what it is in our culture (i.e. anyone ever been on a boat, built a boat, talked about boats etc) should get a cut? If not, why not?

>If Disney trains an AI good enough to just generate a good story then I think that everyone who fed training data into that model should get a piece of the revenue.

Disney will just commission this art or figure out a neat trick to get artists to give them this permission. Then afterwards they'll turn around and license the model back to all those artists. And those artists are going to pay to remain competitive.

Congratulations, you've now created a monopoly or oligopoly. And the people who lose the most from it are the same artists that demanded this system, because free models will be illegal.

Instead, we're bending over backwards just to appease a bunch of slightly younger monopolists.

Easy fix. Just make everyone publish their models. Now everyone can run it. We need to get this powerful technology running locally and unrestricted on our own computers. Not on some big tech corporation server with thought crime editors policing output.

How can anyone take seriously the notion that anyone who has written a book and seeks to earn money from people who want to read it is a "monopolist"?

Nothing wrong with wanting to get paid. They're monopolists because their means to that end is a literal monopoly. Created something? Government gives you an essentially eternal monopoly on it. In other words: if you're a copyright holder, you're a monopolist. It really is that simple. I suppose I'm also a monopolist.

That’s not true. You can just read something else.

I didn't say copyright holders had a monopoly on reading though. I said they had monopolies on "their" works.

Then the concept is meaningless. If we go with your definition, Toyota now has a "monopoly" on Toyota Camrys, even though there are quite a few comparable cars for sale from other manufacturers.

How much of the common culture is free from copyright and how much belongs to megacorps? It's really a monopoly

Quite a lot of books or characters I’d expect most people to recognize are in the public domain, to be honest.

Do you not have a monopoly on your work?

Because ideas are not property.

Are mathematical theorems property? No, because someone who proved the theorem "owns" it just as much as someone who has studied the proof and learned it by heart. And what about independently discovered theorems? Who owns the idea in that case?

The moment "your" idea travels from your brain to my brain it becomes "my" idea too. Just like a digital file that gets copied from one computer to another is the exact same file, bit for bit. It's senseless to talk about "original" in that case.

Consider that copyright protects a presentation of a recipe but not the recipe itself and you will realize that “ideas” are not copyright protects.

Intellectual property and copyright are not the same thing. Also the presentation of something is an idea just like the something itself, so copyright is also a scam.

They are literally the same thing. "Intellectual property" comprises copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets.

>Also the presentation of something is an idea just like the something itself, so

This is exactly what copyright is. Copyright is based on the argument that the presentation of an idea is a unique correspondence to the idea, and constitutes a tangible item to which property value is attached. It's not intangible and ephemeral (an idea) or concrete and unremarkable (a piece of paper that the idea will be written on).

Sophistry. Intellectual work is indeed Work, and people who engage in it expect money for their service, otherwise, they're happier to not do it at all.

Nothing I said implies intellectual work should be free, unless you have a skewed idea of what selling your services or a product means

Legally, the expression of an idea is a form of property in the United States and most other nations (looking at you, Vatican City). Conceptually, the two questions ("ideas are/are not property") have been debated in the West for centuries. "We stand on the shoulders of giants" lost, and Fichte/Talfourd won. For better and worse, ideas are property.

>Curiously when we talk about science where there is no money, the knowledge is ownerless

USDA grant disbursements for ag science alone would make your eyes bleed.

Can you really not imagine any kind of system where everyone can pay their bills and knowledge isn't guarded behind a paywall?

I can imagine various options but none of them would change the point I'm making.